Cigarette smoking is becoming increasingly prohibited in many locations such as, for example, near gas pumps, in office buildings, commercial stores, theaters, restaurants, government buildings, bars, nightclubs, and so forth. Certain buildings, for example, now include non-smoking zones, which oblige the smoker to stand at a certain distance from the building facility. Despite the many federal, state, and local government imposed smoking prohibitions or restrictions currently in place, many individuals continue to ignore such restrictions and engage in smoking activities in public places or locations where smoking is simply not allowed or desired.
Conventional smoke detectors are operative to sense or detect smoke through the use of dual ionization, photoelectric or combined ionization-photo electric smoke detection units. Because these devices are operative only to detect moderate to heavy levels of tobacco smoke, they are largely ineffective in outdoor areas or in large, well ventilated rooms where the tobacco smoking activity may occur in a location which is some distance from the smoke detector, thus not providing a sufficient level of smoke for detection by the smoke detector.
A very different approach to determine if a smoker is “lighting up” involves the use of UV (Ultraviolet) flame detectors (not smoke detectors) to identify the initiation of a flame from, for example, a cigarette lighter or match followed by the sounding of an alarm either overtly or covertly. Such a prior art approach thus detects the ultraviolet radiation of the lit match or lighter. One of the problems with this approach is that the smoker must actually light up the cigarette in the direct presence of the detector, but the detector may not detect important situations such as, for example, when a smoker carries a lit cigarette from a driver's seat to a gas pump.
In general, such smoke detectors are very inexpensive, but do not function well in areas with good ventilation. On the other hand, a lit match detector or lighter detection device works well in areas that are well ventilated, but such devices are very expensive and do not detect when a lit cigarette enters the area.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an improved system and method for detecting the presence of a lit cigarette, as will be described in greater detail herein.